Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/292

284 reeds, and from those arose the Russians. They have white bodies and their hair is often fair, because the stems of the reeds were of a yellowish colour and the tops somewhat darker."—Times, 4th June, 1885.

Ravens in Ireland.—In connection with the raven there are different superstitions, some of which, however, have facts to corroborate them, such as the following: If many ravens appear in a district in the autumn it is said that "there will be great mortality in the sheep during the winter." This nearly invariably is the case, as if the ravens by some instinct know that it would be an unfavourable winter for the sheep.

Mr. Clodd has an unusually happy way of laying before the general reader conclusions and facts which the scientific student already pretty generally knows, but which have, nevertheless, not been before published. The gain hereby secured to science and to literature is not easily disposed of in a sentence or two, because such books mark a stage in the progress of thought which would otherwise be either wholly unmarked or lost in some subsequent studies embracing much wider subjects. And, moreover, without such a book as this the student wishing to look beyond the stage reached by it must necessarily stay his hand awhile for the purpose of traversing this earlier phase in order to get his own work into proper connection with what has gone before. It will be gathered from what is here said that Mr. Clodd's book is a very valuable instalment of the study of folk-lore and its cognate science—comparative mythology. Indeed, we venture to pronounce even a higher value to it than this—it marks